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| Once seen it can't be unseen. |
Flags are very important, and a good flag can do a lot for a country’s image of itself and also help remind its people of their roots, deeper identity, and even purpose.
Even though the principles have been much abused, everybody knows exactly what the French flag means – liberty, equality, and fraternity – and maybe one day those principles can be set in their proper context again of liberty within the fraternity and equality of the common blood.
The British flag is an interesting one, reminding us of the intense competitiveness between the two principal nations that went to compose the UK – "my Jewish saint who never visited Scotland (St. Andrew) matches your Greek Saint who never visited England (St. George)" – and the potent, world-conquering power that later resulted from unifying such stubborn rivalries in one state.
The American flag too is a joy to contemplate – the red lines of the original thirteen coastal states run across the flag in the same East-West way that America’s "Manifest Destiny" would later cross the continent and carry it to the Pacific and beyond, with one quarter of the flag being given to a space where all the later acquisitions could be dumped in star form – the most convenient symbol for denoting great bulk on a finite piece of cloth.
But surely one of the oddest flags is that of Germany, with its odd and oppressive heavy Black bar on top and a lighter golden bar on the bottom, with an intervening slash of red in the middle.
Convincing explanations for this oddity are surprisingly hard to come by.
Historically, the flag seems to have originated in the 1840s, a time of unsuccessful bourgeois revolutions across the continent of Europe. Accordingly, some say that the colours were those of the Jena Student's League or derive from the uniforms – black with red facings and gold buttons – of the Lützow Freikorps, a militia of university students.
This sounds all very unconvincing, rather as if a Socialist Workers' Party placard from the 1970s had somehow been chosen to replace the British Union Jack. So, how do we explain the mysterious German flag?
Rather than being an expression of the past, I think it makes more sense to see it as something pulled by the future. Just as the United States flag incorporated certain teleological elements – the red and white stripes reaching across in prefigurement of Manifest Destiny – so the German flag can be seen even more so in teleological terms. In fact, the German flag only truly makes sense as something reaching towards an ominous end purpose, rather than symbolizing something pushed by the past.
What then does it represent? Until last year, it still was not clear, but then, thanks to Chancellor Merkel, momentous events happened that pointed to the riddle’s ultimate solution, which is namely this:
Even though the principles have been much abused, everybody knows exactly what the French flag means – liberty, equality, and fraternity – and maybe one day those principles can be set in their proper context again of liberty within the fraternity and equality of the common blood.
The British flag is an interesting one, reminding us of the intense competitiveness between the two principal nations that went to compose the UK – "my Jewish saint who never visited Scotland (St. Andrew) matches your Greek Saint who never visited England (St. George)" – and the potent, world-conquering power that later resulted from unifying such stubborn rivalries in one state.
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| Manifest Destiny, 2D version. |
But surely one of the oddest flags is that of Germany, with its odd and oppressive heavy Black bar on top and a lighter golden bar on the bottom, with an intervening slash of red in the middle.
Convincing explanations for this oddity are surprisingly hard to come by.
Historically, the flag seems to have originated in the 1840s, a time of unsuccessful bourgeois revolutions across the continent of Europe. Accordingly, some say that the colours were those of the Jena Student's League or derive from the uniforms – black with red facings and gold buttons – of the Lützow Freikorps, a militia of university students.
This sounds all very unconvincing, rather as if a Socialist Workers' Party placard from the 1970s had somehow been chosen to replace the British Union Jack. So, how do we explain the mysterious German flag?
Rather than being an expression of the past, I think it makes more sense to see it as something pulled by the future. Just as the United States flag incorporated certain teleological elements – the red and white stripes reaching across in prefigurement of Manifest Destiny – so the German flag can be seen even more so in teleological terms. In fact, the German flag only truly makes sense as something reaching towards an ominous end purpose, rather than symbolizing something pushed by the past.
What then does it represent? Until last year, it still was not clear, but then, thanks to Chancellor Merkel, momentous events happened that pointed to the riddle’s ultimate solution, which is namely this:
The Gold at the bottom represents the relative blondness of the German people, especially their women, while the Red stands for the Socialistic ideas of universal racial equality and White guilt that have permeated this society for decades, allowing the blond race to be pushed down below the Black, the symbolic colour of the Southern races.Another way to see it is more explicitly sexual. The Black represents the male Third World migrant himself, the Gold an actual fair-haired German woman, while the Red is the act of violent rape itself, which allows the natural order – the lighter and higher colours above – to be forcibly pushed down beneath the darker and heavier colours.
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| The German flag, 3D version |
The travesty that we saw unfold in Cologne, was, in a teleological sense, prefigured in the German flag that arose in the 1840s. And what does that tell us about that time? Perhaps that the premises of the ideals that stirred revolution in those days were the seeds that carried Germany to its current humiliation.
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| The correct nationalist way to display this flag. |
